The Origin of Us- Spread of Humans, Ancient African Languages, Stone Tools and Cognition

this ucsd-tv program is presented by university of california television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest programs you because of my strange accent I thought that I will add a few written s life so you can see what I'm going to say about so play stoic people moved where they moved they made the same stone tools wherever they were stone tools are basically the ones you use for kitchen equipment cutting butchering and so on carpentry whittling making wooden tools and so on and some personal gear so the way you do your stone tools is the same like language from any age you learn how to do it and you keep the tradition and I would like to point out that some of this tradition in the last four hundred thousand years if not more lasted for a very long time and we have for this there archaeological evidence because eighty to forty thousand years is not something from short from the moment of the Industrial Revolution to the - to the iPhone age or to the smartphones it's much longer and it takes a long time and people keep their traditions and therefore what we are going to look now is see how it works across Eurasia and how because of this because of these traditions because they will kept we can follow and trace the people stone tools don't change because climate change climate change caused extinction of people and climate change doesn't cause necessarily any evidence for change in stone tools the same is the environment it doesn't matter what environment you are you still need your kitchen carpenter nini carpentry and personal Gill so forget about environment and forget about climate change so here good so here is one example a because I note when I say pretty well it was supposed to be the original conquest so this of colonization of Eurasia used to be considered as the beginning of the Chilean culture nonsense the menisci showed it and I will not argue about exact date of this place whether it is 1.78 or 1.77 1.83 mind you the stone tools were the simplest call and flake industries nothing sophisticated and corn flake industries are the same equipment for which within a short time other people arrived in other places away in so if you go for money see where you say referring digging where they found the origin of the original layers well the skulls are and and the the piece on the left side shows you where they are we have come to the alien and it's a different period but remember the first chain is the first people in China got with the same kind of Cohen flake industries but there is no time to elaborate here we come to another problem which is with a Chilean soda Shalini is pretty well known from Africa it's known from Western Europe from Western Asia and from India it's not - Ali and earlier Chilean for sure and the militia Li not known from Eastern Europe why can you explain it maybe the people there didn't read the book and they didn't know that after cornflake industries it's time to use some by facial flaking and by facial flaking is done in China and you can follow this in a paper we published in annual review of anthropology this last year so I'm not going to talk too much about it just show you how they are Chilean is getting out of Africa and Oba Diah in the Jordan Valley where I spent probably 15 years is a one good indication how you find in the different layers the same kind of stone tools you have on the left side some by faces and trihedral and peaks you have in the middle a double a hand x because they didn't know hand x and no one hand X should have only one but it happens in history and then you have the chopper and the spirits this is what you find in over there in every layer over a thickness of over 50 to 60 meters deep and the the next is the famous cleavers and the famous Clippers are well-known basically from from the Italian of India and India has plenty of these cleavers and now they are finally dated to 1.5 million years ago so we have a way of tying together both the Out of Africa of their trillion with the making of the cleavers in India good so back to Israel for a minute and what you see we are dealing with a site of gush of blood Yaakov that perfectly dates to about 800 thousand years ago and as you see in the drawings you have cleavers and hand axes so the question is very simple is in English of note Yaakov where you have the elephant skull and you see the the earliest fireplaces in modern one-layer identified in the site the cleavers came from Africa the making of the cleavers as it is suggested on the map or it is a reverse migration of cleaver makers from India back to the African direction but just stopping in the Holy Land so a questions to think about now modern humans this is basically an evolutionary story of two parts the 4th migration in my count is modern humans according to the molecular and nuclear genetic evidence on which you already held the lot is over 250 200,000 years ago including omo kibish to school crops and so on they could have emerged earlier as yourself as us already from the the lecture of elephant books and definitely many of the African inventions that Ellison showed us very clearly and also leaned widely in her lecture already arrived so the guys are arriving colonizing Eurasia in the same way that the early settlers of North America from Western Europe arrived with all these inventions were already made and they bring them to this continent and of course immediately they have an advantage over the local people so now surprisingly the story will be continued okay so the people the modern humans coming out of Africa and in a way like you heard from the lecture of Chris Pringle you have a end from Ellison we have the musterion industries in Mount Carmel what you should remember is that within an area of no more than 2,000 square kilometers in the Galilee and Mount Carmel in Israel which is probably no more than a thousand or less than a thousand square miles you have many caves with a good number of fossils so the more you dig the more you find an inter bone cave which has the one of the longer sequences as a cave in in the world it's about 23 meters deep and I'm not going to mention the bottom at the top you have in layer B the Neanderthals data 280 to 45,000 years they'll ever see the modern humans there are no days from this place that good ones but we have plenty of dates for from calf Z and other in other places and then before it we have the middle Paleolithic the mysterious and we have no Fossum so you can imagine that they were made by some kind of modern humans coming out of Africa and this is the earliest one is coming with this kind of Laval wa but blade the industry and again this is the kind of industry you learn from your key from your childhood how to make and these people who make these points go further away so we see them in Mount Carmel in the center you see them in US Pakistan and intentionally I jumped over a site I know pretty well from the Republic of Georgia from the Caucasus how far these people got into Central Asia we don't know we always assumed that people were very successful and we never talked about extinction and we also don't when they colonized an area where people were already there it's nice to talk in the wedding because this makes make love no war but sometimes you make whoa no love and you kill the locals and this is one of the kind of a relationship well-known from between the groups of hunters and okay so we go on and these modern humans in Mount Carmel you have in school you have the beads you have the burials the organized burials and so on and you have the same in in calf is a cave which you can see here with the several of these okay a copies for the different burials and you have the combination sometimes but then comes the story of the Neanderthals and if you look at the different populations because Eurasia is one continent you can walk it takes a little time maybe riding bikes it's easier you can work from West all the way to the east so then the under tasks were not these simple idiots who who were able to make LaValle you appoints everyone who can make a live animal point is an intelligent guy well trained and if you don't believe me call my former student Matt inner and in UK and he will tell you that it takes more than a year to do real levallois in industry by practicing it every day for six hours something that only a graduate students can do of course so so if we follow these industries and the fossils and the ancient DNA they already arrived in the Altai mountains around 70,000 and there is more than one according to the artifacts more than one groups of fairly under thoughts did they escaped from the penetration of modern humans or was it before these real modern humans came into the area you can see on the map that they arrived in Iran we have them in the homeless straits possibly also all the way to understand and if you ask me they even managed to get from knowing the Chinese material all the way to this place north and drilling province which is next to North Korea so let the Chinese dig more and we will have Neanderthals in China not only modern humans prior to the arrival of modern humans ok one of the well known under thought by now is the Kabala cave you can see the skeleton the burial and I will not take go into the details and then we come to the new migration of modern humans and this is again not as just a sweeping story going through Eurasia but it is a very complicated story itself why because we relate the production of blade industries which are much simpler and more like cottage industry when it comes to making stone tools when you compare it to the Laval WA which you have to be an intelligent to do it so not surprisingly plastic industry came after some other things that we did before and what you can see here is that the blade industry go all the way to Altai mountains the blade industry go all the way to northern China where you find industries of real upper Palaeolithic that if you take them from there and I've seen them in my own eyes and break them to either West Asia even you of no one will tell you we'll be able to say that they're Chinese so modern humans managed to get there however the line that separates this blade industries and the common Flake industries which are part of East and South China remains the same there are claims for blade industries in India that goes back to 45,000 I think they are in place don't believe everything you read so in addition the colonisation of Australia did not take place straight from Africa it was by by industries of flake industries I've seen it on my own eyes on silk read a very good material as it was shown before here to make blades these people were not blade makers they were making a different common flake industry much more like Southeast Asia and south and South China so they are probably the descendants of some complicated migration of modern humans into northern China and then into the South okay now to start the story again from the archeology we go back to Egypt where that the site of the Hansa show clearly the industry which is known as the Nubian musterion making a way for the blade in the early blade industries in the Levant whether it is Sabich elbow Qatar teeth or the Emir and makes no difference I think I suggested this in 2000 now more of the local guys who work the accepted around forty-five fifty thousand years ago they move into the Levant only later to the Caucasus straight into Europe all across Europe and because they came as different groups I then their identity was not the same it's not like a mass migration but a migration of different groups going all the way into Western Europe not reaching everywhere okay and you can see some examples the balloon eaten in the Czech Republic which we published long ago with years is Bobo de and the material from Krakov or the material from the Aleutian and so on so there are different groups and the work of Shara Bailey and jean-jacques hublin clearly demonstrated that the teeth of these modern humans differ from one place to another well when you come especially when you compare them to the Neanderthal lift with right moe keeping the unique character so once we are dealing with different groups of people they penetrate into the region and what they do they cross the retreat of the Neanderthals because they take the better areas probably by using better hunting tools like bows and arrows and so on all the inventions that came from from Africa then he understands retreat to the north and they retreat to the south and then say so different processes including decreasing in total fertility rate etc without going into the details they slowly slowly disappear and the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic and I will not go here indeed in details because it's still a controversial issue the first culture of modern humans was the shuttle peroneal it's not in my humble view not an acculturation of the Neanderthals and the one that everyone except is they they are Indian and you can see there in ASEAN evidence on on this slide in front of you and the Iranian culture is a Western European and they are in a way like the Americans it's a it's a it's a group that was mixed from different groups became very strong well United equipped and what happens to them they keep expanding like all the others because expansion is in our genes and each of us would like to have larger territory better territory a better life conditions and these are the principles I think of human history okay then we the Apple Paleolithic people these modern humans getting also the Delta mountains and what we see we see in the nice oven the nice body decorations and I will not show you any of the artifacts and so on an in addition the distribution of the blade industries grow as I mentioned briefly all the way almost to Korea and probably into northern Korea later but we don't have enough evidence as I have seen a mentioned from the Jilin province and still the area that is controlled by Colin Fleck industries remain the same and some of these modern humans who are also makers of Kovan flake industries but they did some somewhat differed from the L lower Paleolithic or the mill Paleolithic of China these are people who invade into Australia and it's not surprising because Australia according to work of built cell many years ago Australia was colonized much more than one wave in one of those waves in during the Holocene bought the blade baking into the Australian world people like to expand you cannot stop them and this is what happened to modern humans so now we go to China when really modern humans reach the place once they reach the place you have the modern human skulls for upper cave circuit yet you have the the de Combinator the blade body the questions found in upper caves of Fujian and some of the bottles the trend in another cave Thiago Xiang in northern China so people in the north are there as well and this was nicely supported now by nu by nu genetic studies of the remains form kin-yuen cave H a DNA the bones were dated already in the past to 40,000 and you can see this publication from the PNAS final conclusions for May 2013 because we can change our conclusion and time like we like the more we learn the more we know the more we redesign our conclusion so what we have is the dispersed a lots of modern rooms can be traced and geologically but this takes time careful archaeological fieldwork little stone tools analysis by experts and not by amateurs and comp report the genetic evidence more easily obtained can and should motivate archaeologists to enhance field work and careful dating we can trace at least five major migrations before the Holocene but probably there were more back migrations of care and we should try and identify them as well thank you all today there are four recognized major established linguish language families of Africa there's the niger court of famine and you'll see i give a few samples of languages that belong to those families languages that you might have heard of there'd be many others you wouldn't have niger Kordofan ian nilo-saharan afro-asiatic and quois on so for families and nearly all of the well over a thousand languages spoken in the 49 continental countries of africa today belong to one of those families now to say that languages belong to a family is to say that and we use this term genetically related and that means all the languages of the family descend from they all evolved out of the common a single mother language we call it a proto language and that language would have been spoken by a single community is or a collection of closely related speech communities at some period in the past now just a note the descent of languages is like the mycotic descent of single-celled organisms a mother language a proto language diverges into its daughter languages it becomes its daughters it doesn't go on existing alongside them and you can see the this sort of a little family tree or whatever model we might call it here this model here shows initially the proto-language developing dialect differences then they'd be still mutually intelligible and that's sort of represented by the overlapping lines the overlapping ovals and then as time goes on the dialects become more different and they become eventually distinct separate daughter languages and this is a kind of process that can repeat again many times and has repeated many times in history the daughter a daughter language itself may eventually become developed dialects and then split into languages and as it diverges it becomes it leaves it was it becomes therefore a proto language and gives rise to other languages now the existing language families of Africa the for families that account for nearly all of the African languages does this mean that the four proto languages of those families I'm sorry but at a point I need to bring out all of those language families in Africa have relatively deep histories as families go the proto language of each of these families was spoken no more recently than the close of the Pleistocene probably no more recently than thirteen fourteen fifteen thousand years ago now does that mean that the proto languages of those four families were the only languages spoken in Africa at the end the close of the Pleistocene well of course it doesn't there would have been hundreds of other languages spoken in Africa then just as there are today but over the long millennia since the end of the Pleistocene the speakers of those four families happened have been the ones that mostly did the spreading out into new areas and as they spread in new areas sometimes faster sometimes slower they eventually spread over large parts and over larger and larger parts of the continent now as they gradually expanded into new territories they incorporated eventually the people already living in those areas into their societies and so as a result the other languages that might have been spoken in the Late Pleistocene in Africa eventually passed out of use they became extinct well perhaps not every one of them there have been suggestions in recent years of four languages that might go back separately that's stand outside the major families two of them in West Africa one in Ethiopia and it's also been proposed by quite a number of scholars think that hodza shouldn't be included in the choice on language family which I would put it into and that it should be also understood as another separate line of earlier linguistic dissent in the continent there is now a particular feature of how languages evolved that allows us to extract historical information from them and it works like this changes take place over time in how people pronounce the words of their language you can you are familiar with this just by listening to people speak different dialects of English but here's the key point these sound changes follow regular sound change rules they operate according to regular sound change laws and we can formulate these rules and then we can use these rules to reconstruct back in time a lot of the lesser greater portions of the lexicon of the words that would have been used back in the proto language of this particular family we're looking at so let me give you example I'll give you an example of regular sound change involving Spanish and English English and Spanish belong to the indo-european language family they are daughter languages descendants of proto-indo-european the mother language of the indo-european family now in English the original consonant that we reconstruct as a proto-indo-european will just say P here regularly became F Spanish on the other hand maintain the pronunciation of P down to the present so what I'm going to do is give you an English word in it and you'll see how these cognates go yeah it's got a P doesn't it okay or looking at one sound correspond it's not all the other ones in the word now we think obviously of Pescados I hear people saying too but think of pass which is the more direct cognate pescado is the cott one comes from Pescara two fish another one you can get quickly right and the preposition for yeah both both Potter and pour come from the same reagent root word as English for they just came through a little bit different sound change rule history people got that poco good don't necessarily think of that poco has a suffix added to it it's the pull part that's the same as the English word a few is you also have to be able to take words apart now these are examples just one consonant PE and just in one position the beginning of word if a P might have occur in some other part of the word you might have a different regular sound change for it so you have to look at all those sorts of details and there are regular sound change rules that explain the vowels the difference of owls outcomes and the other consonants in the words it can become quite a complex that involved matter as you might imagine so not something we can go on looking at more today but once we discover once we work out the sound change rules we can do as I mentioned before we can begin to reconstruct something of an approximation of what the original word would have been and what its meaning would have been in the proto-language here's how we reconstruct the root words that lie behind the proto-indo-european words that lie behind those cognate words that we have listed here on our on our scene on our site here it's not just words like this though that we can reconstruct we can reconstruct words that tell us about the culture about the ideas about what people knew and believed just to choose one example in each of the African language families we can reconstruct words to their proto languages that show that the people who spoke them knew of bows and arrows and here are the materials from the four families you might have a couple of consonants look strange to you down on the Kois on those are click consonants I'll have something to say about later and you notice actually cows on another piece of information we have a word we can reconstruct a word for arrow poison so we know something about their technology a particular thing that's likely not to show up in the archeology so reconstructing ancient lexicon can allow us oftentimes to reconstruct things in culture that maybe won't ever turn up in the material record it adds to our knowledge it's an additional independent source of information but the sword the information from these four families each takes us back only to the late pleistocene in the case of quois on may be a little older maybe 20,000 years ago a little bit earlier than the other two the other three families I mean but that still leaves the question how do we connect up back the previous thirty to forty thousand years back to say the period when humankind began to move out from Africa across the rest of the world well before proposed remnant languages from the earlier periods it's too bad they're so few they might eventually give us a little information but so far they haven't been properly studied in that way but there is another kind of evidence has come out recently that's informative on the early evolution of human language a recent systematic study has shown that the dispersal of humans out of Africa was accompanied by a recurrent trend toward the simplification of the consonant systems there are individual exceptions languages which over the history developed a little more complicated consonant systems but overall the pattern has been that the farther human beings moved from Africa the less complex the simpler their consonants its systems tended to become the most complicated consonant systems left today are in Africa the simplest system of all with just eight consonants is in the Hawaiian language spoken note notice at the far end of the farthest end of human movement into the Pacific as far as you could get from Africa so even individual cases kind of got that that sort of insight that this particular article discovered the writer of this article now there is a reason why history should tend this way in consonant systems first off some kinds of consonants are easily recreated by new sound changes in the language so you might have a COS consonant particular constant or set of consonants that might get lost from the language in the course of its history but centuries later there might be new sound changes that would recreate those sounds I'll give you an example here recreating a lost consonant by looking at the Germanic branch of indo-european English as a Germanic language in proto-germanic the ancestral just Germanic languages the original what we reconstruct as K and indo-european became H so it looks like K is gone but around to somewhere in the same broad period of time another sound change law operated that created new case and proto-germanic by changing earlier into your European G in decay so you have one sound change that might eliminate a particular consonant but another sound change rule later on coming along and recreating bringing that back into the language but on the other hand there are consonant systems quite a few subsystems of Kaunas categories of consonants which once they are lost do not get replaced or may be very hard to ever be recreated again and so one good instance is the Ferengi alliance and so I'll give you a couple of examples from Arabic which is the language very much characterized by fringe eels and we can use these two names which you would recognize cabinet and Mohannad it's arachnid and Mohammed I do hear that unusual H leads to us unusual for just English speakers H like sound it's not Ahmed it's added well this sound is pharyngeal because the locus of meaning the sound is part of the throat the pharynx and so that's why the adjective Ferengi Oh among consonant sub sort of categories of consonants in the world this Ferengi allows are one of the categories that once they're lost tend not to ever be recreated by later sound changes they're gone from the system so what happened as people moved outward from Africa is that if they did go through a sound change history where they dropped one of these systems these subsystems that couldn't be recreated again then that was never going to come back and as people moved farther from Africa that process apparently was repeated and so the result was that the farther you got from Africa the fewer of these kinds of unusual what we would think in English is unusual consonant subsystems disappeared and then the simpler the consonant systems became now there is a particular category I want to bring our attention around now to of consonants that once lost do not seem to be able to be recreated and that is the Kliq consonants and the Kliq consonants are especially notable they're notable because they bring one they bring around by including point here but they're notable because their history may have something to tell us about the fundamental relationships among all the language families of the world you've been to the zoo perhaps I'm in San Diego certain a good place to do this and you might have encountered the antelope called the kudu kudu there I made it much better that time kudu well you know it better is the kudu of course and you may have read to children a book about the blue Lu spelled GNU of course this is the blue that's one of those click consonants these are click consonants are these words got Indian leash because they came from a Koi sign language the Kois on family has clicked and these words came from them now as regular consonants as regular sounds in word Birds clicks are almost entirely restricted today to the Kois on family as parts of real words they do occur in a few southern African languages and in one a staff ricchan language that are not going on because these languages borrowed words with the clicks and they kept the clicks in the words when they borrowed them they adopted them from choice on languages people so virtually outside of choice on these sounds are not found anywhere else in the world not is parts of regular words we do in English do you know a disapproval sound that's one of those quick consonants or you might known for at least in my focal injury that's to get a horse to move faster or something okay those are just D consonant all by itself not put in a word so yeah we can do those but try putting like I said with kudu and put it in a word much hardly got to practice a long time but that's just because we're not used to it children who grow up European ancestry whatever they grow up in that environment they learn the clicks just as quickly as any of the local children do well if we look back at what we saw with this article Quentin Atkinson that I gave a quick reference to earlier the implication of his findings are that the most complicated consonant systems in human history would have been far back in time they would have been the ancestral language and click consonants because of the unidirectional 'ti of constant of consonant change should have been in the consonant system of the earliest human language but why only in the case on language family today well late Russian linguist Sergei starostin and I came up separately and then talked about it with each other with a conclusion about why this might be and our conclusion and this is wrapping up what I have to say was that our proposal not a conclusion but our hypothesis our proposal was that the languages of the world today belong to just two deep deep time macro families choice on what we what we proposed is that cosine is the lie remaining representative today of one of those macro families this was the macro family that spread across the southern parts of Africa its language retained cliques the rest of the languages of the world belong to another big macro family all the rest of the languages this the ancestral language of this family lost clicks that gave us a parsimonious explanation one period in history with the loss of clicks and here is a representation for you of a family tree you see a South sort of southern half of Africa language set of language families all extinct except for quois on the left a North distributed African family all the rest of the world the other three African families and all the rest of the language is the world belonging to that family well leaves us bar closing thought there are some significant parallels here because the division of human languages if they if this hypothesis turns out to be correct we have a southern half of Africa with a basic big division within humankind and then the rest of a human kind from northern Africa outward this looks a bit like some recent ideas of how where the deepest lines of genetic connection within the human genetic ancestry are located the same kind of division and so I leave you with that thought thank you good afternoon thank you very much for the invitation to speak to Carter and I'd like to begin as I do in my adopted homeland Australia by acknowledging the native tribes who were once the sole owners of the land on which we are meeting archaeologists should always be mindful of and respectful about the indigenous people whose past we study I've been asked to talk about stone tools and human cognition I might have chosen a different topic if I could being given free rein but as it happens last week I was in the field near Cloncurry and by Aboriginal friend Gordon Connelly took us to a quarry here we found these artifacts which we may identify I've marked them they weren't actually marked like that in the field which we may identify more or less as an old Irwin chopper and a Chilean hand axe Lavelle WA Kor a mysterion scraper and an upper paleolithic blade a classification that has its roots in the 19th century and I wondered what we might make of that the study of how stone tools contribute to the grand narrative of human evolution is dominated by that set of named industries mostly known from studies in Western Europe and and Africa and related to the types of this one quarry in Australia thinking about the application of these labels in Australia opens up our understanding of the significance of stone tools for researching the evolution of cognition the study of cognitive evolution must go beyond the artifact forms that allow these labels and classifications so to develop this argument my talk has four steps we need a definition of cognition or we will not know what we're talking about everyone thinks cognition happens in the brain so we need to say something about brains and if we're talking about the evolution of cognition we need to talk about changes in brains then if we want to understand the evolutionary processes we need to think about how human cognition is different from that of our common ancestor with other Apes and finally we need to think about how cognitive changes can be inferred by understanding stone tools I argue that the processes involved with stone tool making and use were one of the selected context in which cognition changed and I've got to do all that in 18 minutes George Miller originally defined cognitive science as aiming to quote discover the representational and computational capacities of the human mind and their structural and functional realization in the human brain implicit in this definition is the understanding that we cannot understand the mind simply by looking at the brain we need to look at representation computation and function not just at structure increasingly there is an understanding that cognition is also a product of interactions of people with other people and between people and things brains do not fossilize so any statement about structural and functional realization in the remote past is an inference from the fuzzy evidence preserved on the inside of the skull going beyond the surface of the brain understanding the capacities of the human mind in the past depends on inferences about past behavior using direct evidence from the archaeological record or from arguments about mental processes derived from observation of modern Apes and humans all of which means that there has been a lot of development of theory much of it contentious about how to interpret the interactions between the mind and brain in the past let us begin with brains brain size is an unreliable guide to anything that's why I'm concentrating on it and internal organization is more important but I believe there is one important point about brain size we need to consider the relation between brain size and body size big animals have big brains because they are big not necessarily because they are somehow cognitively better for technical reasons the only way to get over the problems of the long term interaction in hominins is to consider the pattern of changes over time in brain size the darker colors on this graph and body size the paler colors there were two major episodes of change in the first the range of brain sizes increased apparently followed by an increase in the range of stature there were later selection against brain smaller than 700 milliliters and stature below 1.4 millimeters I suggest that more of the early brain size increase is related to was related to body size increase than it's generally acknowledged but the timing makes it a difficult argument in the second episode statute did not change very much give or take a couple of basketball players suggesting that this was not about bodies but probably about the way in which the brain was organized and functioned and the change at this time was also followed by a selection against brains smaller than a thousand milliliters generally the flakes and cause of the earliest stone tools emerged during the earliest brain size spaces and in different parts of the world continued into the time of the second episode of stasis they may be related somehow to removing the selection against large brains perhaps through their role in the acquisition of high-quality food the flakes and cause of stone industry is called assure lien the foundation stones of our knowledge of human antiquity began sometime after the first expansion of range of brain size and around the time of the extinction of the small brained individuals and continued through the second episode of stasis but they also occur in Australia the one on the left is from Australia first people after the end of the Australian from a region that never had an usher lien the Australian evidence demonstrates that the distinctive forms occur without being part of a tradition and I would argue they have all over the world throughout that one and a half million years and we need to be aware of equal finality as an explanation for stone artifacts similarities but you cannot simply juxtapose such evidence rather we must attempt to discuss the theoretical framework in which the interactions took place now is the time to go to sleep in archaeology we are most familiar with the working memory model of mental functioning through the lack of Coolidge and win badly and Logie originally defined working memory as comprising those functional components of cognition that allow humans to comprehend and mentally represent their immediate environment to retain information about their immediate past experience to support the acquisition of new knowledge to solve problems and to formulate relate and act on current goals they defined a multi-component working memory as having four subsystems the phonological loop the visuospatial sketchpad the Central Executive and an episodic buffer a phonological loop is an essential component of the functioning of this model and it is closely related to the use of language but that begs the question of whether nonhumans which do not use language could possibly have working memory as badly conceived it but no one in this paradigm has developed a model of what cognitive function would be in a hominin before they had modern working memory or language Barnard described a more complex conceptualization of human cognition that's the one on the right in case you hadn't worked that out involving nine subsystems that process different types of sensory stimuli but in rather different way I rather similar ways this model can map on to the elements that characterized bad Lee's model but it emphasizes the external connections of individual cognition and that there are separate elements of the central executive that process all information seen heard or felt in the body the exciting thing about Barnard's model is that it permits understanding of the cognition of the last common ancestor and intervening hominins the similarity of form of each of the subsystems in the model allows for the construction of models that account for monkey and for ape cognition in Apes the linkage between the visual system and the effector system that controls limbs and other bodily functions seems to be controlled by a specialized subsystem that is something like hand-eye coordination the six subsystem model would account for the difference between Apes and monkeys which only have five particularly in achieving some tasks requiring bodily dexterity and also in learning through imitation in the process Byrne has described as recognition of essential elements of actions through statistical generalization the logic of the construction of these models of simpler cognitions also produces an argument about how the nine subsystem model emerged from a supposed six subsystem last common ancestor this logic predicts that there must have been models with seven and eight subsystems which have had only ever been exhibited by non-human hominins and they were very and there are various consequent predictions about what the cognitive abilities of those hominids must have been how might this relate to stone tools because that is what I was asked to talk about and I'm not trying much beyond that brief however much I want to we know that some other Apes and at least one monkey species manipulate stones the fact that gorillas are not known to and that the monkey is a South American species shows that stone tool use is a convergent behavior in monkeys and humans importantly chimpanzees in the wild flight stone accidentally while cracking nuts but they do not use the flakes or appear to notice them captive bonobos and an orangutan have been taught to make flakes by humans and they've also been taught to obtain rewards by cutting a string or should I say severing a string only human common ins appear to have had the natural ability to remove flakes from caused by the intentional application of aimed force untaught apes do not burn has argued that Apes have many of the necessary cognitive behaviors to do that but not the ability for accurate aiming if you get hit by when you go to the zoo it's not because they're accurate but just because you happen to notice it I argue that they also do not perceive a need for cutting a team led by Bern argued that for many implicit roles called semantic roles in Fillmore's approach to language there is a great similarity between humans and chimpanzees for example there is implicit agency when the chimpanzee mic climbed a tree just as there is when John opens the door similarly the dative role can be seen when one chimpanzee grooms another as well as when I give something to someone the issue is whether the Apes can extract meaning from these performances one of my projects has been to suggest that the persistence or permanence of stone tools was part of the reason why hominins became differentiated from other Apes after the last common ancestor the same semantic roles can also be found among the early hominins using stone tools making stone tools involves striking one stone with another a hominin but not an ape behavior in addition six of these eight hominin examples leave a distinctive material product a permanent product repetition of actions that leave similar material products provides the circumstances for the identification of statistical regularities among these actions and products not only by us as archaeologists but by the hominins themselves I would argue that this was the selective context for hominids to become to come to recognize the semantic value of such roles and hence to extract meaning in relation to them the persistence of the products of the performance of roles impacted hominin cognition I've also done the same analysis of mark making the beginnings of picture making it's possible to define the same roles but for four of them the role can only be defined in terms of the mental processes that are conceptually removed from the actions or rules I've argued that this could only be explicit represented by the ninth subsystem of Barnard's cognitive scheme various comparisons between ape and early hominin technology have emphasized the similarities such as that between the digging stick and the termite wand one comparison district this comparison by Bill McGrew compared the these two tools using Oswald's flawed method roll methodology to suggest that the term iting wonder the chimpanzee as being a single strand could be compared to the Tasmanian digging stick I would say and also a medieval sword but the digging stick requires a stone tool to cut and make it and generally is embedded in a more complex technology of bags and nets and often in ritual and mythology so I think we can list differences between ape and hominin habitual stone use and I want to add one more more's analysis of the reduction sequence used in Tasmania shows that what else where he has called the basic flake unit usable tools were made by the consequent sequential application of simple principles of flake removal most napping most places of the world most of the hominin evolution has been of this type but in the hunter valley of mainland australia and of course lots of other places as lin indicated that basic flake unit was the beginning of a more complex process where cores were prepared then subjected to heat treatment and then flaked once more to produce more specialist products these in turn were ultimately hafted a process that also required the production of the haft and of gum I use this example to illustrate a feature of stone making stone tool making that resonates with some research in cognition particularly in relation to working memory much of this research involved testing the ability to remember lists of numbers making the task more complicated by distracting the attention of the person remembering the numbers with a list of words interspersed with them I suggest that the initial ability to incorporate such asks sorry such distractor tasks test the extent of our ability to store things in working memory I suggest that the initial ability to incorporate such tasks into a sequence when they are completely altered the focus of attention represents a new cognitive ability one that you have if you've been able to follow my argument despite the distractions of the rock art images the ability to retain the proposition of the task in memory while your attention is distracted is fundamental to human as opposed to other hominin cognition so we can add attention distraction or rather retention despite distraction to the list of cognitive features of stone tool use we can attach dates to these cognitively significant events the ultimate attention distraction retention tasks were the construction of watercraft that brought people to Australia where either the craft had to be assembled from disparate materials present in different places or it had to be made by hollowing out a tree trunk with hafted stone tools in either case for use with nets in another place tentatively I offer the following narrative cutting emerged about three and a half million years ago and probably represents the emergence of cognition beyond that of the last common ancestor napping is present by two and a half million years ago and represents a clear distinction from the abilities of the last common ancestor in recognition of the capacity of hominins to divide the core into separate useable entities and one of them having a further function related to third objects I will speculate that this was also the stage at which the seventh subsystem emerged separating the affective subsystem into separate systems relating the limbs on one hand and the articulator x' on the other the talky bits vocal utterance under controls separate from emotional states might have been possible at this stage a further speculation suggested these 2 novelties and their connection to meat acquisition and other enhanced food opportunities were associated with the relaxation of selection against large brains and subsequent increases in body body size extension of napping to string together consequent Flake removals followed from the emergence of napping and was probably part of the selective context for the emergence of the eighth cognitive note subsystem this involved the cognitive extension of such consequent strings to combinations of vocal utterances the cognitive leap to constructing tasks which involved attention distraction and retention with achieved by 150,000 years ago this led in turn to the emergence of the ninth cognitive subsystem by which humans could imagine tools and tasks before they made them and can create new opportunities that did not arise from the contingencies of their current actions we can play the game of matching these stages with the classification of fossils with intriguing results but I do not have time to go on into that mercifully the next slide showed the human skeleton so if this is problematic for you please look away until the last slide so the last twist of the story is as follows the barriers to colonization of the last new worlds of Australia and the North and hence the Americas were cognitive barriers they were crossed as a result of the creative conceptualization of solutions to the problem of water crossing and of survival in the North watercraft and sound clothing both involved planning of activities long before their realization important impossible without solving the problem of intention distraction that was behavioral modernity us had really arrived the Skelly's going now thank you you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 69,199

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Keywords: Ofer Bar-Yosef, Christopher Ehret, Iain Davidson, human evolution

Id: 7btmAMpRLJE

Length: 59min 5sec (3545 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2013